Harry Potter and the Bones of Empire

Two days ago “Big names in AI and Silicon Valley tech announced yesterday that they’re launching a boarding academy for 16 to 22 year olds.” (Faine Greenwood) And I commented, “This is a kind of modernized version of the English boarding school and those were actually pretty horrible. I mean, it’s fun to read boarding schools stories but think about what it was like to live them out! […] My spouse has an absolutely scathing critique of [the Harry Potter] books. I think I’m going to ask them to tell me again and write it out as a blog post!”

And I did, I interviewed them, and here is the result, which I think is very interesting.

The Flapping of Angry Butterfly Wings, August 14, 2026

Wrote these exceptionally angry Bluesky posts over the past few days

• We seem to be suffering—the world seems to be suffering—a moral apocalypse. USAID cuts. Slavery in China. Genocide in Sudan. Environmental destruction. The list goes on and on. The wealthiest tech CEOs—Musk, Thiel, Bezos, Zuck—as well as many lesser figures are moral voids.

On the Countercoup, and the Trials After

“Stop saying history will judge them. Judge them now. With judges.”—Joe Sandow, writing at the beginning of the Biden Administration

We forget that the Nuremberg trials were military tribunals; the victors in a war enforcing their will upon the losers. Some of the victors chose to do so by exacting justice but nothing constrained them to do so; the Soviets wanted to have show trials but failed to get the other participants to agree.

At Nuremberg law was created to prosecute the crimes of the Nazis. “Crimes against humanity” was invented to describe heinous acts previously unimagined. These concepts led to the writing, decades later, of the Rome Statute and the creation of the International Criminal Court.

Review: Griffin, The Nature of Fascism

Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

A remarkable and remarkably dense book on the nature of fascism. Griffin, who seems to have read everything about fascist, protofascist, and reactionary movements of the first half of the 20th century provides what is probably the best working definition of fascism: palingenetic ultranationalism; that is, a movement based on the idea of nationalist rebirth of a people. I’m not equipped to judge such a densely researched and reasoned book, literally the densest non-mathematical book I have ever encountered, but Griffin is widely respected, except among Marxist historians.

Brief Remarks on the US-Iran War

(I seem to be laying out a foreign policy position. May the ghost of George F Kennan guide me.)

Brief Remarks on Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan

Abdul El-Sayed appears to be an actually committed public health policy expert and advocate but as a politician he does not seem to care very much about people. The comparison, perhaps, is with Elizabeth Warren; genuinely good on economic issues but rotten on cultural issues. I don't think AeS appreciates the danger of the demons he has summoned with his antisemitic rhetoric or that he has alienated black voters in Michigan, a significant voting bloc.

On balance I want him in the Senate. I think his voice and vote on health policy will be valuable, but we are going to have to hold his feet to the fire on other issues, and he may not win because he's alienated an important group of voters.

In Defense of Bernie Sanders

I’ve been seeing a lot of shade thrown at Bernie Sanders, including a lot of outright lies, and I figured I’d gather up some of the positives, and lay them down here, so that there’s a record of them in a place I can refer to; I’m tired of reciting them, and getting nasty incoherent comments in reply. I also think that, despite these genuine positives, Sanders sometimes is a poor judge of character, as we have seen in his recent endorsements, and the man is 84, and perhaps losing his touch. But I remember, I still see sometimes, his critics lying about him, and twisting everything positive said about the man into a reason to hate him. That’s reading the sources the way fundamentalists read the bible, and the only possible result of such readings is to reinforce the readers’ biases. So I’ve gathered these up for people who haven’t seen some of them, and so I have a record for my own use.